I was fourteen when the last beef herd on my grandfather’s farm was taken for slaughter. He was converting to maize. “Used to get a hundred dollars and more per hundred pound weight,” he said as the last cow lumbered up the ramp, “I got sixty dollars on this lot. Cost me more to raise them than I’m getting back.” And gramps wasn’t a hold out. He saw the way vat-produced meat was growing, and got out - grew maize for bio-diesel until he sold the farm and retired to a cabin in the Ozarks where he fished for fourteen years, before dropping dead of a heart attack aged ninety-three.
In the thirty years since his death farming animals for food has all but disappeared. There are still people who eat dead animals, I guess there always will be. After all, people still smoke, or take heroine. But the mass consumption of animals bred for slaughter is gone.
Growing up with farming in the family I was more clued in to where food came from than the average youth, and Dad was a stickler for cooking from scratch - no microwaved ready meals in our house - so, while I’d never been to a slaughterhouse, I understood the link between a whole chicken and the meat in my fajitas, or a side of beef and the steaks and half-pounders we grilled on the barbecue. Being clued in didn’t mean I thought about it more than anyone else, and that carried over to the new method of meat production.
These days it’s hard to imagine eating meat made any other way than in a vat, but it’s also hard to imagine meat being grown in a vat.
The companies who produce our meat are big business. The early successes were mostly swallowed by the mega-corporations, though a few survived long enough to build their own momentum. One of those successes was NU-Food, started by the son of a software engineer, about the same time my gramps was selling off his herd.
Amber Lighter was one of the last Silicon Valley successes, before The Big One turned it into Silicon Lake. Her software advances underpin more than two-thirds of all programs which run today, according to some estimates. That ability to do something new in a crowded, market appeared to be genetic when her youngest child, Dolan, started his company.
A bootstrap loan from mom allowed Dolan too plow early returns back into the business, and retain control. The first lab-factory was in an abandoned airframe manufacturing site. In a property at the far end, and with prevailing winds blowing into the desert, NU-Food set about creating batches of vat-meat.
Several employees from those early days spoke of the collegial spirit of the venture, of late nights spent watching pink sludge becoming putrescent, of the stench from failed attempts. But soon they found a recipe, a process, which worked.
Now, sure of his product, Dolan turned to selling it. There were a few small contracts with local business owners, enough to provide a stable turnover for a new company. But small and local was not Dolan’s focus. And here he got lucky.
For decades, nearly a century, burgers were a staple food for the average American. But thirty years ago they were out of food fashion, and along with them the burger joints which served them. After expanding to the point of ubiquity, they were retreating, leaving empty buildings on corner after corner throughout the nation.
The arrival of vat-meat gave burger joints a new lease of life. Some companies developed their own meat, building a flavor profile suited to their customer base, others purchased from one of the multi-nationals.
At the same time NU-Food was seeking to expand, Happy Burger, H-B, was engaging in a franchise program. From thirty outlets over two states it was looking to go nationwide with one hundred outlets in the pipeline, and another two-hundred-fifty close to joining it. Their long term plans were much bigger.
H-B initially sourced their meat from local wholesalers but now wanted a greater degree of uniformity, and guarantee of supply. Discussions with Kraft had been slow, and H-B weren’t enthralled by some of the terms being offered, especially as negotiation appeared to be a one way street.
When Dolan met H-B’s CEO at a franchiser’s breakfast meeting it was the gift each of them was seeking. Within weeks H-B had a single source for their meat, NU-Food had an expansion plan. And business leads to business. A member of the H-B board also sat on the board of a prison company, CarCan Correctional. For all the business H-B brought in, CarCan caused NU-Food to explode.
One-point-two percent of the population is incarcerated according to the Bureau of Statistics, up from point-nine-eight five years ago. That’s over four million people, all being fed three meals a day, every one of three-hundred-sixty-five a year. CarCan cares for twenty-two-point-three percent of those, nearly one million people. Within a year of the breakfast meeting which brought NU-Food and H-B together, NU-Food was CarCan’s sole supplier.
Last year H-B had four thousand franchised outlets, and sold an average of eighty-two burgers per second - all supplied by NU-Food. CarCan inmates receive enough meat per day to make about six H-B burgers. It’s packaged up different, but that’s the allowance. An H-B burger costs two-bucks at the Drive-thru. It’s hard to get exact figures, but best estimates put the meat cost at about thirty cents. CarCan pays NU-Food three dollars per inmate, per day.
Let’s tie that all up:
H-B sold forty-two burgers a second all year up to three years ago, nearly thirty million burgers. At thirty cents each that’s almost four hundred million dollars a year. A healthy amount.
CarCan uses the equivalent of six burgers per-inmate per-day for a whole year, that'd be 2,190,000,000 burgers. And CarCan pays fifty cents for each, for a total of $1,095,000,000
NU-Food got to be a billion dollar a year business by feeding criminals.
But that’s not where I came into this story. I don’t write for the business pages. I don’t investigate fiscally dubious, or corrupt, government tender practices. I write about crime. Grim, tedious, happens every day, in every way, crime.
When I started out it was a split between murder and burglary. Now it’s mostly murder. And most of those are the result of melodrama so mundane that, if it was turned in as a script for The Melodrama Channel, the writer would be told to make it more believable.
But occasionally there’s a killer who catches the eye of the public. Whose murders are still capable of shocking our desensitized souls.
Four years ago I wrote about Terry Rice, the Carmel Cannibal, from the discovery of the first body parts, through the F.B.I. investigation, and the trial. I interviewed Terry on several occasions. Those interviews were the most unpleasant of my journalistic career. Even now remembering his quiet complacency makes my skin crawl.
His life imprisonment should have been the end of our association but, in agreeing to be interviewed, he stipulated follow up meetings over the next year, as he adjusted to prison. I agreed to them, but never expected he’d follow through - the reality of prison life tends to knock arrangements like this on the head. And I wasn’t going to pursue it, there’s little journalistic currency in a criminal serving his sentence.
Thankfully my editor thought otherwise.
I sat with Terry three months after his sentencing. He actually looked healthier than when he was convicted. I commented on it.
“I spend twenty-two hours a day in my cell,” he said. “I do sit-ups, crunches, push-ups, and tai-chi - best I can in the four-by-eight space I have. In the two hours I get outside I run round the yard like I’m training for the Olympic Marathon.”
It feels wrong to complement this monster, but he seemed to have found a way to deal with solitary which few others in such a position manage.
“It’s not quite solitary,” he told me. “I’m with other’s like me. We can talk to through the vents.”
In saying ‘others like me’, he meant cannibals. A whole floor devoted to people who ate other people. It almost beggars belief there’s so many of them. But in any population there’s always the statistical outliers for whom civilization is a struggle, to whom other people are a thing to use as they see fit. It is a psychological sickness we have been unable to dispose of.
Terry pressed on. “I have a story for you.”
Mentally I braced. Prison confessions of further crimes are well known. They’re a specialty of narcissistic personality types who struggle with the drop in attention post trial. Terry hadn’t been diagnosed as such, but it’s not an exact science and someone whoe believes another human is food for them has to have at least a soupçon of narcissism.
“I’m listening,” I said, flipping open my notebook as proof.
“My greatest fear of being locked up was the food,” Terry said. “My palate, my digestive system, were primed in specific ways.” He’s never, directly, admitted to cannibalism, preferring euphemistic terms. “Indeed, the first few days after my arrest the food was execrable, I thought I would starve. Then I went to Drazzle County Prison and suddenly things were better. I didn’t know why, but they were better. I truly believe the food there got me through the trial. Then I came here.” He paused for a moment before asking, “Do you know who Jim Bentipo is?” I shook my head. “The Lunchtime Killer?” Now I recognized the name, and nodded. “He’s in the next cell over. Him one side, Niall Lamfrey, The I-70 Cannibal, on the other. They clued me in to why the food’s so good. You want to know?”
I nodded, but it didn’t seem enough and he stayed quiet. “Sure,” I said.
“It tastes the same,” he said. He sat back, folded his hands across his chest, and smiled.
“The same? You mean the same as—-“ I didn’t want to say it, but he wasn’t going to, just raised his eyebrows a little. “Human?” I asked.
“Not all prisons,” he said. “Seems you’ve got to be in a CarCan joint to get the good stuff.” He leaned forward again. “That’s a story for you, isn’t it?”
It was. And some of you will have followed it over the months it’s played out. Ex-employees disclosing how the early meat profiles were formulated with human tissue and cultivars - and the non-disclosure contracts they had to sign; NU-Food’s stock collapsing as the story came to light - and that of the companies they supplied, of which H-B was the best known; Dolan Light’s ousting from the company followed by his arrest and trial. These events have all been well reported, some of it by me.
Meat may never be the same again. NU-Food won’t be, not after Kraft bought it for cents on the share. It’s almost certain H-B won’t be. From a high of 8,500 restaurants they’re back down to about a 5,000 this year, and many of those owners are in the midst of changing franchise. CarCan feeds prison inmates with meat from a different source. I believe it now costs us taxpayers about $3.50 per inmate per day.
When gramps told pop he was selling the farm I remember pop worrying what gramps would do, how he’d survive. Gramps did okay.
I’ve had occasion to wonder how Terry Rice has done since telling me about the meals he got in prison. I wonder how his fellow inmates have responded to discovering he’s the reason their meals taste different, less to their preferred flavor profile.
I can’t find it in myself to worry about him.
text by stuartcturnbull. picture from 🤦♂️爪丨丂ㄒ乇尺 🤷♀️🤷♂️ 卩丨ㄒㄒ丨几Ꮆ乇尺🤦♀️ via Pixabaynovel
This story is the inspiration behind the LA Noir novel I'm slowly working on